Pushing the Limits (Or Not)

Overclocking the NEO 17 is a little bit complicated, and might be a bit overwhelming for beginners, but I feel confident that most of us that read these pages can find it simple once you know how to approach it all. This is good, and is far more than I had expected to find here on the NEO 17. When XMG gave a press release to say they supported undervolting, I never expected what I found on the NEO 17 that supports both overclocking and undervolting it to be as extensive as this.


It's one thing to have options in the BIOS to make adjustments, and another to see them actually work. With XMG's NEO 17, overclocking options are present for memory alone, while the CPU gets undervolting options. Being as preoccupied with memory tweaking as I am, I was pleasantly surprised that the options in the NEO 17's BIOS weren't dependent on XMP profiles or the like; rather there are many manual timing and voltage options present for you to play with.


The first thing I explored was both timing adjustment and clock speeds above factory default, which I am happy to report works perfectly. You can take pretty much any available SODIMM kit on the market here and get it working, since both timing and speed adjustments work as they should, even all the way up to 6400 MHz, which you can see I got working fairly easy:


I simply adjusted CAS to 50, memory divider to 64, and memory voltage to 1.2 V. I saved the settings in BIOS. You do first have to enable the memory control option in the Control Center software first, and then boot into the BIOS, but this is a simple task that is easily overcome. It did take a while for the NEO 17 to boot that first time after changing settings, but I assume that this was it performing memory training, so I simply waited a little bit and stared at a black screen for about a minute and a half before the system came to life with its new memory speed in place.

I cant stress enough how important this ability to adjust memory speed and timings really is. It just simply works so well and is easy to use, and helps ensure that should you ever wan to upgrade the memory, there is good chance that you can choose whichever high-end kit you like, and you'll be able to get it working. Support for 32 GB DIMMs is present already, so both speed and capacity are covered here. So is XMP support, so if you aren't that familiar with memory tweaking, you can buy a kit with XMP and get things running super easy.


I'm not one to just settle on easy, so I pushed down the timings and upped the voltage to 1.35 V while keeping the memory speed at 6400 MHz. I ended up at 32-38-38-96. Not bad.